Liiife! Give my creation…. LIIIIFE!
So today my SRAM arrived, really well packaged and very promptly (So hats off to ScribblyGum Technology for that) and I thought, since I won’t be able to use my workbench for the next 3 days, I’d have a stab at replacing the SRAM tonight.
It was a battle to remove the old chips, even with a desoldering gun and tonne of my good flux. I had to clean the desoldering station halfway through just to get through the job.
Once the chips were finally out, I mounted in some machined pin sockets, and plugged back in the original RAM, to make sure my desoldering effort hadn’t made things worse. It hadn’t. If anything it seemed slightly better than before.
Now I knew things were not worse, it was time for a swapover test. I swapped in both of my “brand new” 2114 SRAM chips, powered it up and bingo!
That’s what I wanted to see!
A quick “Hello World” confirmed everything was hunky dory.
To see if it was one chip or both chips, I swapped the old chips back in, one-by-one and to my surprise, both were no good. They are MOS branded components, and they do have a reputation for being sub par compared to other companies for RAM and 74 series logic.
It’s awesome to have such a significant vintage system in my collection.
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